“Just do it.”
We each booby-trapped our own houses. James, John, and I quickly dumped all the trash cans — the used Kleenex, the empty food cartons, the old newspapers — on the kitchen floor. I poured lighter fluid all over the trash, then sprayed the rest on the downstairs carpets.
When we were all packed and in our cars, a block or so away from the houses, we set off the detonators.
We hadn’t planned it that way, but the houses went off in sequence, from left to right, and the sight was truly awesome. The explosives we’d gotten were obviously extremely powerful. Walls blew outward, flames exploded from underneath suddenly rocketing roofs, and in a matter of seconds our homes looked like wildly burning piles of junk timber.
The salesmen were running out of the office, yelling at each other, running around wildly. I knew that one of them had to have already called the police and the fire department, and I honked my horn, pointing toward the road, and Philipe nodded. He stuck his head out the window of his car. “Follow me!” he yelled.
He sped out of the subdivision, down Chapman, and the rest of us followed. Just past Tustin Avenue, a fleet of cop cars and fire engines passed us, going in the opposite direction.
We got on the Costa Mesa Freeway, heading south.
We took the 55 to the 405 and did not stop until Philipe turned in at a gas station in Mission Viejo. He had obviously been thinking while he’d been driving, and he came back to each of our cars and told us to fill up. We were going to go down to San Diego for a few days, he said, stay in a motel, lay low. He still seemed shaken, frightened, and he told us to pay cash for the gas and not just steal it — we couldn’t afford to leave a trail.
“You know San Diego,” Philipe told me. “You lead the way. Find us an anonymous motel.”
We drove downstate, and I led the way to motel row. We picked the Hyatt, one of the bigger and more impersonal places, and stole the keys off a maid’s cart, taking rooms on one of the middle floors. After dumping our suitcases in our respective rooms, we met in Philipe’s suite to watch the Los Angeles news on cable.
There was no mention made of what had happened at Familyland.
We watched the five o’clock news, the five-thirty news, and the six o’clock news, switching from channel to channel.
Nothing.
“Those fuckers,” Mary said. “They covered it up.”
“What happened to Buster?” Junior asked. It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d left Familyland, and his voice was quiet and unnaturally subdued.
“I don’t know,” Philipe admitted.
“You think he’s dead?”
Philipe nodded.
“Who but us would even notice or care that he’s gone?” James said.
We were silent after that, each of us thinking about Buster. I found myself remembering how happy he’d been on that day we’d trashed Frederick’s of Hollywood, how he’d said he felt so young being with us.
I felt like crying.
“Even if no one noticed that he was killed, the fact that Familyland kicked everyone out and closed down is news in itself,” Philipe said. “Either the company has enough clout to keep that out of the news… or someone else does.”
“Who?” Steve asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I have a bad feeling about it.”
We spent the next day at the motel, monitoring newscasts, reading papers.
The day after that, we went to Sea World.
Philipe got over his nervousness and paranoia extraordinarily quickly, and by that second day it had disappeared without a trace, leaving no residue. It was at his urging that we went to Sea World. He and the others treated it like a normal day, a normal outing, enthusiastically reading the list of times for the dolphin and killer whale shows when we arrived, rushing over to look at the shark tank. I could not believe that they could so easily forget Buster, that they could react so casually to his death, that they could carry on as if nothing had happened, and it depressed the hell out of me. Buster’s passing might not be noted by the world at large, but I’d at least expected it to have some effect on his fellow Ignored. Were we all this expendable? Were all of our lives this meaningless and inconsequential?
It was at Shamu’s show that I was finally compelled to mention it. We were sitting in the front row of the grandstands, had just been soaked with water after the killer whale had done a belly flop in the pool directly in front of us, and the other terrorists were laughing uproariously. “This is great!” Paul said. “I’m sure glad we came to San Diego.”
“We came here because we fucked up when we tried to blow up Familyland and Buster was shot to death and the scary ass-fuckers who blew him away were going to do the same thing to us. We’re not here on a fucking vacation!”
“What’s with you?” Philipe said. “Chill out.”
“Chill out? Two days ago, you made us blow up our damn houses because you thought those suits were chasing us — ”
“That was two days ago.”
“Now Buster’s dead and we’re here having a great time at fucking Sea World!”
“It’s not as if he died in vain.”
“What?”
“He gave himself for the cause.”
“Oh, so now we should be happy to sacrifice ourselves for ‘The Cause’. We’re supposed to accept that as part of the cost of doing business. I thought the whole point of all this was to free us up so that we would not be cogs in a machine, just small parts of a large organization. I thought we were supposed to be fighting for individual rights. Now we’re just supposed to submerge our individuality in another group. Yours.” I met his eyes. “I, for one, do not want to die. For anything. I want to live.” I paused dramatically. “Buster did too.”
“Buster’s gone,” Philipe said. “There’s nothing we can do to bring him back.” He fixed his gaze on me. “Besides, why should we feel bad? Why should we feel guilty? We were always there for him when he was alive. We were his friends, his family, we provided a place where he belonged, and he knew it. He was happy with us.”
I didn’t want to believe Philipe, but I did. God help me, I did. I tried to tell myself that he understood the way I thought, that he was able to manipulate me because he knew me so well, but I could not make myself believe it. Philipe was right. Buster had been happier in the last year of his life than he had ever been before, and it was all due to us.
Philipe looked at me calmly. “I think we need to kill a celebrity.”
I blinked, caught off guard. “What?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. As you said, we fucked up Family land. We haven’t accomplished anywhere near what we set out to do as terrorists. But I think killing a celebrity would get us a forum. We’d be able to take our case to the public.”
“I don’t want to kill,” I said. “Anyone.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.” But, again, that secret something inside me agreed with the reasoning of Philipe’s argument, thought it was a justified course of action.
“I don’t either,” Tim said. “Why don’t we just find a female celebrity and rape her?”
“Why don’t we kidnap a celebrity and hold him hostage?” Mary suggested. “We’ll get a lot of publicity that way. And we won’t have to take a life.”
“We’ve all taken lives,” Philipe said in a cold, hard voice. “You all seem to conveniently forget that. We’re not virgins here. None of us are.”
“But some of us have learned from our mistakes,” I said.
“What do you want to do, then? Nothing? Big change calls for big action — ”
“What change? Who are we fooling here? You think killing someone famous is going to change who or what
